A year ago I stumbled across a story about a worrying new surveillance program developed by the NSA: PRISM. While nobody was identified as the source of the disclosure, I was awestruck by the bravery of this unknown person.

At that time the Obama administration had been waging an
aggressive war on whistleblowers: ex-CIA officer John Kiriakou, who exposed the CIA's torture
program, was languishing in prison while the torturers went free;
Kirk Wiebe, William Binney and Thomas
Drake of the NSA had narrowly escaped prosecution for
exposing NSA malfeasance – indeed, despite having gone through
all the approved channels, Drake had faced a 35-year prison
sentence; and of course the kangaroo court had just started to
try Chelsea Manning for her exposure of US war crimes.
Inevitably, it is the whistleblower Manning who is now serving a
35 year stretch in prison, not the war criminals.

President Obama has used and abused the 1917 US Espionage Act
against whistleblowers during his years in the White House more
times than all his predecessors put together, while at the same
time allowing a bone fide spy ring – the Russian illegals exposed
in 2010 - to return home. This paranoid hunt for the
insider threat has been going on since at least 2008,
as we know from documents leaked to Wikileaks in 2010.

Against this background, fully aware of the hideous risks he was
taking and the prospect of the rest of his life behind bars, a
young man stepped forward. Four days after the initial PRISM
disclosure, Edward Snowden announced to the world that he was the source of the story and
there are many more to come. He was clear then about his
motivation and he remains clear now in the few interviews he has
done since: what he had seen on the inside of the NSA caused him
huge concern. The American intelligence infrastructure, along
with its equivalent agencies across the world, were constructing
a global surveillance network that not only threatened the
constitution of the United States, but also eroded the privacy of
all the world's citizens.

The global surveillance state wanted to master the internet, as another disclosure proved, and
the UK's GCHQ stepped up to the plate. As increasing numbers of
us conduct aspects of our lives over the internet (be it banking,
health, social lives, organizations, activism, relationships)
this growing lack of privacy strikes at the very root of
democracy. Privacy was enshrined as a basic human right in the UN
Declaration in 1948 precisely because without it we are
vulnerable to the encroachments and abuses of the state. What
Snowden has disclosed would be the Stasi's wet dream and goes far
beyond the dystopic horrors of George Orwell's novel
"1984."

So what did Snowden disclose? Prism was only the start, and that
was bad enough – a program to scoop up all our metadata: whom
we're in contact with, for how long, what we're reading, what
we're viewing. NSA apologists say that this is not invasive, and
it is not looking at the contents of communications. I can assure
you that metadata is intelligence gold dust. It can provide a far
more detailed overview of a person's life than any individual
communication often can.

But it gets worse. Then came Tempora and associated documents that
disclosed that the UK's GCHQ was mainlining information from the
transatlantic fiber optic cables, which affected all European
citizens, as well as displaying how GCHQ was prostituting
itself to the NSA for money and putting NSA
objectives above the priorities of the UK government.

And then XKeyscore, enthusiastically used by Germany's
BND, presumably without the knowledge of its
political masters. There have been many more: Brazil's Petrobras oil company, the French telephone
network, charities, the Muscular access point and the massive Fascia database, which contains trillions of
device-location records... Where to stop?

This last most grimly does away with the "done nothing wrong,
nothing to hide" argument. In this era of families living in
different countries and long-distance relationships, Skype is
increasingly used to stay in contact with loved ones. And this
contact can be somewhat intimate at times between couples. On
video. Anyone who has ever used Skype for
such purposes must surely be feeling violated.

Out of this morass of spying came moments of personal annoyance
for western politicians, not least the information that German
Chancellor Angela Merkel's mobile phone was also being tapped, as were those of numerous other
politicians. Which rather blows out of the
water the much-abused argument that all this surveillance is to
stop terrorists. On what planet would the NSA spooks need to live
to seriously think that Merkel could be deemed a terrorist?

All these disclosures are of the gravest public interest. Yet how
have Western politicians reacted? In the usual way: shoot the
messenger. All the standard li(n)es have been trotted out by the spies:
Snowden was too junior to know what he is talking about, and was
"just" a contracted systems administrator (this line
says more the ignorance of the politicians about all things tech
than anything about Snowden's job); that Snowden is a traitor for
fleeing to Russia, when in fact he was trapped there by the USA
withdrawing his passport while in transit to Latin America; or
that he should "man up" and return to the US to stand
trial. There were even apparently calls from the spies for him to be extra-judicially
murdered.

Despite this, his disclosures have resulted in congressional
hearings in the US, where senior spooks have been caught out
lying about the efficacy of these spy
programs. A US federal judge has declared the NSA's activities
unconstitutional, and minor reforms are underway to protect the
rights of US citizens within their own country.

Which is a start. However, that still leaves the rest of us
living under the baleful gaze of the NSA and its vassals.

The new legal?

The British response has been largely muted, with politicians
immediately assuring the grateful citizens of the UK that
everything done by the spies is legal and proportionate, when in fact it was manifestly not.
Nor is this any consolation for the rest of Europe's citizens –
after all, why should the British Foreign Secretary be able to
take it upon himself to authorize intercept programs such as
Tempora that sweep up the communications of an entire continent?

Press discussion of Snowden's disclosures in the UK has been
largely muted because of a censorship notice slapped on the
media, while the Guardian newspaper that
helped to break the story had its hard disks smashed up by GCHQ.

Other countries have displayed a more robust response, with
Brazil planning to build its own transatlantic cables to Europe to avoid the Tempora program, and in
Germany people have been demanding that the constitution be upheld and
privacy ensured against the American surveillance behemoth.

The European parliamentary Civil Liberties, Justice and Home
Affairs (LIBE) Committee has held months-long hearings with evidence from tech experts,
whistleblowers and campaigners about what it should do to protect
EU citizens from the predations of the US. Edward Snowden himself
gave a statement. This is all well and good, but it
would be more helpful if they could give Snowden asylum in Europe
and also put in place some meaningful measures to protect our
rights one year on - in fact, all they would need to do is enact
the provisions of the European parliament's own July 2001 report
into the Echelon fiasco.

Echelon, some of you may remember, was a global
proto-surveillance network, where the intelligence agencies of
the US, UK, New Zealand, Australia, and Canada (also called the
Five Eyes) could all share product and subvert oversight measures
in each other’s countries. In 2001 the EU recommended that Europe
develop its own internet infrastructure and move away from its
dependency on US corporate proprietary software. All good
suggestions, but all too soon forgotten after 9/11 and the rush
to the "war on terror."

One year on from Snowden I would suggest that these measures
should indeed be implemented. The European Parliament needs to
take action now and show its 500 million citizens that it is
serious about protecting their rights rather than pandering to
the demands of the US government and its corporate sponsors.

So, on this anniversary, I want to salute the bravery of Edward
Snowden. His conscious courage has given us all a fighting chance
against a corporate-industrial-intelligence complex that is
running amok across the world. I hope that we can all find within
us an answering courage to do what is right and indeed take back
our rights. His bravery and sacrifice must not be in vain.

The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of RT.